‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Tuesday, March 16, 2021 2:32 PM, Marc Shapiro via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

&gt; On 3/16/21 2:32 AM, g4sra via Dng wrote:
&gt;
&gt; &gt; &lt;--snip--&gt;
&gt; &gt; With your removable drive attached and mounted...
&gt; &gt; Paste the outputs of 'mount' and 'df' when run as root.
&gt;
&gt; The drive in question is /dev/sdb1.
&gt;
&gt; root:/home/marc# mount
&gt; /dev/sdb1 on /media/archives type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,user)
&gt;
&gt; root:/home/marc# df
&gt; Filesystem&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 1K-blocks&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Used Available Use% Mounted on
&gt; /dev/sdb1&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 1663749752 1267718540 311447996&nbsp; 81% /media/archives
&gt;

Good, that answered some of my queries.
Now as root again, paste the output of a comparative usage of the directory structure immediately above where the files were that you deleted.

For example if you have

/media/archives/2021/march/january
/media/archives/2021/march/february

then execute

du -s /media/archives/2021/march/*


/media/archives/january
/media/archives/february

then execute

du -s /media/archives/*


expect an output that ends with a 'january'

root:/home/marc# du -s /media/archives/*
9913216   /media/archives/january
43905428  /media/archives/february
219244    /media/archives/march

I cannot make the following judgement, hopefully you can.
Compare the directories usage, as you know their expected contents determine if it makes sense.
An extra 200GB somewhere should stick out like a sore thumb.

Once you are certain where the extra usage is, you can work on that directory alone.
My very first check would be sorting by size including .dotfiles


ls -alrS /media/archives/january